August 05, 2004

Content clauses are not necessarily complement clauses

Andrea Lafferty, the executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition
(a conservative religious organization) was recently quoted
here
by Brian Leiter saying something that provides an excellent
illustration of the rationale for a terminological distinction made in
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
Ms Lafferty said:

"There's an arrogance in the scientific community
that they know better than the average American."

The Cambridge Grammar refers to finite clause constituents like
that they know better than the average American as content
clauses, taking the term from the great 20th-century Danish grammarian
Otto Jespersen. We don't call them that-clauses, and
we don't call them complement clauses, and there are solid
reasons for both decisions. Ms Lafferty's quote provides a good example
to illustrate why the second of those decisions is correctly made.

There are two reasons we don't call constituents of this sort
that-clauses. First, that would be a parochial term
rather than a universally applicable one: other languages have
constituents of what appear to be exactly the same type, but in Spanish
they're marked with que and in German they're marked with
dass and in Hindi they're marked with ki and so on. Second,
in many contexts the word that is omissible, and it would seem
perverse to name a constituent after the one word in it that is freely
omissible without any change in the construction (omit any other word from
that they know better than the average American and you get either
an ungrammatical constituent or at best one with a different meaning).

But we also don't call them finite complement clauses, though many
linguists would. The reason is that content clauses are often
complements, but not always. Notice that there is no way we can say in
general that the noun arrogance takes content-clause complements:
it just isn't grammatical to say something like *His arrogance that
everything will be all right amazed me. (Try replacing
arrogance by assumption and note the difference.) You might
want to say that Ms Lafferty's remark isn't grammatical either, but
it surely comes close, and it's fully intelligible (Brian Leiter quoted it
and discussed its content at length; he didn't say it was garbled and he
couldn't understand it). So set aside the question of whether it's
perfectly grammatical, and just consider how we can talk coherently about
its structure, for it certainly has syntactic structure. We can relate it
to something found elsewhere if we note that occasionally utterances like
this are encountered:

What's up with you, that you're looking so miserable?You must have been sitting awfully quietly, that he could could
come in there and not notice you.

What's important about such examples is that the clause after the comma
is not subordinate, in the sense of having the function of complement to
some noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or preposition that licenses it.
Ms Lafferty's remark can be regarded as illustrating the same sort of
possibility. Whatever the exact details of the structure, the point is
that the constituent that they know better than the average
American is a content clause but it's not functioning as a complement
clause in Ms Lafferty's sentence (we're leaving the matter of how it does
function to be determined by future research). So the property of being a
finite complement clause is distinct from the property of being a content
clause, despite the fact that nearly all content clauses function as
complements.